For Paul it demonstrably was who first—even if a certain preparative work had
already been done—introduced into Christianity the ideas whose influence in its
history up to the present time has been deepest and most wide-reaching.
Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Luther, Calvin,
Zinzendorf—not one of these great teachers can be understood on the ground of
the preaching & historic personality of Jesus; their Christianity cannot be
comprehended as a remodeling of ‘the gospel’; the key to their comprehension,
though of course sundry links stand between, is Paul. The backbone of
Christianity for all of them was the history of salvation; they lived for that
which they shared with Paul. This second founder of Christianity has even,
compared with the first, exercised beyond all doubt the stronger—not the
better—influence. True, he has not lorded it everywhere, especially not in the
life of simple, practical piety, but throughout long stretches of church
history—one need but think of the Councils & dogmatic contests—he has thrust
that greater person, whom he meant only to serve, utterly into the background.

But this reshaping of Christianity was manifestly a precondition for his work of
setting it up, over against Judaism, as a religion with a principle of its own.
Without his theology of redemption he would not have been able to treat Judaism
as a superseded religion. He preserved the new faith from pining away as a
Jewish sect; he rescued it for history; but he did this by transforming its
character.

Paul is, in truth, a figure grand enough to have a place in the world’s history.
We need not think for a moment of those special incentives and suggestions which
an Augustine or a Luther found in him. What enabled him to accomplish the task
of his life was that religiously, as well as intellectually and morally, he was
an extraordinary personality; and no doubt this also, that he had not become a
Christian in the normal way. The ‘revelation’ freed him from the fetters of
tradition in which the members of the mother community were bound; it gave him
the power to make a new beginning.

Jesus or Paul: this alternative characterizes, at least in part, the religious
and theological warfare of the present day. The older school is no doubt
convinced that with Paul it enters, for the first time, into possession of the
whole and genuine Jesus; and it is also able, to a certain extent, to take up
the historical Jesus into its Pauline Christ. Still, this Christ must needs for
the most part crush out the man Jesus. On the other hand, even the ‘modern
theology’ is not willing to forsake Paul. Paul is rich enough to afford them
precious thoughts, such as they can make entirely their own. It finds especially
congenial Paul’s fight against the Law, although the ‘protestant’ element in
that contest is readily over-estimated. But in Paul’s own mind all this, without
the kernel of his Christology, is nothing, and no honour paid to the great
personality can compensate for the surrender of this kernel. As a whole Paul
belongs absolutely to ecclesiastical orthodoxy, whether it preserves his views
quite faithfully in matters of detail or not.